Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 144

“Man was the first to hide himself from God (Genesis 3:8), after having eaten of the forbidden fruit, and is still hiding (Job 13;20-24). The will of God is to be here, manifest and near; but when the doors of this world are slammed on Him, His truth betrayed, His will defied, He withdraws, leaving man to himself. God did not depart of His own volition; he was expelled. God is in exile. (Essential Writings pg. 91)

Taking in the first sentence above should cause us great alarm as well as crumble the facade and mendacity humanity has built up over the millennia that God hides, that God has withdrawn from the world. It is humanity that is hiding, from the first error Adam made till now with all of our errors, our missing the marks. We blame God for being too distant and no longer interested in the works of humanity, many so-called ‘religious people’ blame the secular ones, the infidels for God’s withdrawing from our world rather than take responsibility for the hiding all of us do.

Our hiding is so subtle, most of us are unaware of how we hide from both God and our own inner life, our spiritual core. Our hiding begins early on when we deny wrongdoing because we don’t want to be ‘punished’, when we seem incapable of being responsible for our actions. We hide, as Adam did, because we refuse to learn from our errors, we are afraid of doing T’Shuvah, taking inventory, and repairing any and all damage we have done to the world, to another human being, to ourselves. Rather than “failing forward”, we keep falling backward into denial, blame of another, etc. We are so stuck in our hiding that we even blame God for our malice, our cruelty, our inhumane ways of treating one another. “Nothing happens in God’s world by accident”, “God loves the rich and successful and doesn’t love the poor and needy as much” are two lines we hear often from the people who hide the best. “They brought this upon themselves and this is God’s retribution”, is another phrase that ‘proves’ God is punishing the people who are downtrodden, who need help and care. “God loves me and not you”, hence I am successful, “I can enslave you, making more profit on your back is just me using my God-given talents and smarts to succeed, it is what God wants” gives some people the right to take advantage of the power they have and even turn democracies into autocracies.

We hide from our spouses, our significant others, we hide from our children and our employers, we hide from our employees and our friends. We hide from our clergy and they from us. Hiding is the appropriated state of humanity, it seems, since the time of Adam. Hiding from God allows us to hide from everyone, hiding from God allows us to do what we want to and use/blame God depending on the situation. Hiding from God has been and continues to commit us to a slow death while we are alive. Our hiding from God, from family, friends, causes us great angst, that we have decided to call mental illness, we have decided to call it depression, anxiety, bi-polar, etc. While these conditions do exist and need medical treatment, they are diagnosed much more often than medically sound! They are used as an excuse for our hiding from God, they are used as a pap for our hiding from one another, and the solution, therapy and pills, do not deal with the underlying cause: a spiritual malady caused by our hiding from God!

Maimonidies in his “Eight Chapters” cites the differences between medical healing and spiritual healing. While we may not agree with all of his conclusions, the thrust of this book is to educate us on the spiritual health/sickness we all may suffer from. When we believe we are not worthy, this is a spiritual malady; when we believe we are more worthy than anyone else, this is a spiritual malady; when we believe we are meant to have “rule and dominion” over another, another group of people, we are suffering from a spiritual malady; when we believe that the color of our skin, the ‘faith or non-faith’ we ‘practice’ makes us better suited to hold power and ‘those people’ have to be subjugated to ‘our way of being’, we are deeply ensconced in our spiritual malady. We have taken hiding to such a level that we have become blind to the truth, we have become ignorant of God’s will, we are delusional as to our ‘nearness to God’. Yet, we continue to live into our hiding and our delusions, we continue to believe that anyone who helped us who we now have to step on, it is God’s will for us to be disloyal to principles, to values, to people, to God. We continue to shout our loyalty to God, our adhering to the rituals, the dogma all the while betraying the Covenant, ignoring the call of the prophets, refusing to take responsibility and fiddling while the world burns from climate change, from authoritarianism, from our hiding.

Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance in the first sentence above shakes me to my core. I have spent the past 35+ years not hiding, not blaming my hiding on God, on another. I continue to take responsibility for my actions and accept the actions of another. Yet, I continue to be crushed when people hide from me, when I experience what I thought was real and true actually be a facade that was really, really good. This is what we all need recovery from: hiding and believing our facades are real. We all need to recover from our spiritual malady and the first step on this path is to admit we are spiritually ill, we are hiding from God, from the people around us, and this hiding causes great pain and harm to another, to God, and to ourselves. The next right action is to open ourselves up to God’s healing power as the prophets teach and proclaim to us; Hosea calls out to us that no matter how many times we have committed adultery, no matter how many times we have prostituted ourselves, God is ready to accept us back, God desires us to return. I know this to be true from my history and the experiences of so many people I have encountered in helping them recover their spiritual health. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 143

“We have trifled with the name of God. We have taken ideals in vain, preached and eluded Him, praised and defied Him. Now, we reap the fruits of failure. Through centuries His voice cried in the wilderness. How skillfully it was trapped and imprisoned in Temples! How thoroughly distorted!” (Essential Writings pg. 90)

“Now, we reap the fruits of failure” is truer today than when Rabbi Heschel wrote these words. Then, as now, his words must have been dismissed, thought to be hyperbole, many were basking in the glow of victory over the Nazis in the Second World War, while fearful of Russia believed in the might and right of America, Israel was a State again, the baby boom was on, etc. Yet, Rabbi Heschel, in his prophetic eyesight, could see how we were reaping the “fruits of failure” of our religious institutions, our moral deficiencies, of our bastardization of God’s Name, God’s will, God’s path for us. Today, we hear how “skillfully” God’s will and God’s name has been “trapped and imprisoned in Temples” and how God’s name and God’s will is used for reaping “the fruits of failure”.

We have more poverty at a time when there is such great wealth in the world, we have more mendacity when truth would serve us better, we have more hatred when love is talked about so much, we have more moral decay when the Bible is used as a weapon when it preaches love, kindness, forgiveness, community. We are witnessing and participating in the failure of humanity to hear God’s voice as it “cried in the wilderness” of yesterday and still cries out to us today. God is calling to us from Mount Sinai, from our Temples and our Churches, our Mosques and our homes, from our souls and yet, we continue to imprison it with our intellects and rationalizations. Our clergy fail us too often, our teachers fail us too often, even our parents fail us.

Our clergy fail us, in many cases, from their fear of their congregants, parishioners, boards. To speak the truth, to end our trifling “with the name of God”, to embrace and praise God, rather than eluding and defying God calls for a deep sense of courage, of outrage, of overcoming the fear of ‘losing our positions’ of being the Kohanim that God calls us to be in the Bible. Rather than speak the words of the prophets, rather than call out the name of Jesus, our clergy have to have a renaissance of spirit, to allow their souls and their morality to overcome their desire for political power, their wanting to keep their ‘job’ while missing the call from God. We, clergy, have to willing to follow the examples of the prophets, of Jesus, of Moses, et al, and stand up for truth, stand against the desecration of God’s name, we have to end our taking “ideals in vain” and stand with God instead of trying to make God stand with us. We have to be spiritual leaders and spiritual healers, rather than spiritual charlatans offering pap to the needy while catering to the wealthy, to the powerful. We have to end our crusade to ‘be the only way’ and embrace all paths to God knowing that there is no path that fits all people. We, the clergy, have to do our own T’Shuvah, our own Chesbon HaNefesh, accounting of our souls, then make our amends and find our way back to serving God rather than a board, be willing to go to jail like Jeremiah and the Berrigan brothers and Dr. King, attend the protests against mendacity, against immorality, against Godliness as Rabbi Heschel, Rabbi Prinz, and so many others did.

Our institutions of learning are no longer free to teach the whole story. In colleges and universities students no longer go to learn about life, to discover the vast wealth of knowledge of history, science, religion, humanities, they go to get trained and indoctrinated. In some places learning about the abject horrors of slavery and holding those slaveowners to account is verboten, against the law! In some places ignoring the truth about Hamas and how often they have failed to say YES to a deal for the return of hostages and a cease-fire is de rigueur, learning how many times the Palestinians turned down a deal for a two-state solution is forgotten. In our schools today, active shooter drills are commonplace and many schools are waiting for the next shooting, praying it won’t be on their campus’ while extolling the bastardization of the 2nd Amendment.

We “reap the fruits of failure” in our families as well. We have forgotten to raise our children’s spiritual life while concentrating on their physical, intellectual, and mental health growth. We are reaping these “fruits of failure” by the apathy, the attachment to lies and deception that the internet and social media have created, and the focus on “getting mine” that has overtaken our world-both with children and parents. Raising our children to be decent human beings who care for the needy, welcome the stranger, treat each person as a divine reminder, has been lost in our quest for ‘success’, for ‘enlightenment’, etc.

We, the people, are in desperate need of recovering our hearing and our eyesight, of healing our spiritual “holes in our souls” so God’s voice isn’t unheard anymore in the wilderness. We need to remember that we have to build a “Mikdash”, a place within us and our community so that “God dwells among us” is a call that was made in Exodus and is still being called out today. We have to open our ears and our eyes, our hearts and our minds to more than what we can readily see, hear, feel and think and follow the calls of Rabbi Heschel, the prophets, Dr. King and Thomas Merton, the Dalai Lama and the Hasidic Masters, Moses and Jesus: CHOOSE LIFE. We, the people, have to stop choosing death and curse, we need to be blessed and bless others so we can reap the fruits of our success at being human. This is my quest and I pray it is yours! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s Wisdom - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 142

“We have trifled with the name of God. We have taken ideals in vain, preached and eluded Him, praised and defied Him. Now, we reap the fruits of failure. Through centuries His voice cried in the wilderness. How skillfully it was trapped and imprisoned in Temples! How thoroughly distorted!” (Essential Writings pg. 90)

Continuing to understand and implement Rabbi Heschel’s teaching in the second sentence above, I believe it is incumbent upon us to ask ourselves if our preaching and our praising are just deceptive ways of hiding from our eluding and defying God, as Rabbi Heschel teaches us. Taking in his words and rebuke of us, hopefully, forces us to take stock of our self-deceptions, our believing in the mendacity and deceptions of another(s), and return to the spirit of one of the paths towards decency, faith, and living in community that the Bible gives us.

Yet, in the last 70+ years, our preaching has gotten more subtle in its hiding from and eluding God, our praise has covered over our defying of God so well most of us are unaware of it. We hear preachers extolling Christ while preaching ‘prosperity gospel’, we listen to Rabbis engage in the minutia of Talmudic reasoning while forgetting and/or ignoring God’s call to us through Isaiah-don’t bring me your sacrifices, take the actions that uphold the dignity of every human being, we hear Imams speak of Allah Akbar, while promoting inhumane actions through terrorism, through prejudice, etc. God eludes so many of our Clergy, in all faith traditions, because we are so deeply ensconced in our self-deceptions, we have learned to spout mendacity from their teachers, we have made being a member of the Clergy a career rather than a calling. We are held captive to a board of directors, we are called out when we speak truth by the people in the pews who do not want to look at themselves. The easy solution is to blame the Clergy, the more difficult and responsible solution is to look inside ourselves and do our own inventory, take our own responsibility and make the changes we need to make so we end our “preaching to the choir” of people seeking to elude God and instead speak the hard truths of change, of reconnection to the principles of the Bible, and seek new responses for the myriad of life’s challenges we face.

When we sing Hallelujah in our churches and temples all the while thinking about our business life, our economic woes/fears, our belief in fearing the stranger, blaming the victims of need, wrapping ourselves in the literal word of the Bible to validate our ignoring the poor, we are defying God. When we use the goodness of another as a weapon against them, we are defying God. When we use the vulnerabilities of another against them, we are being evil and defying God. When we believe our privilege gives us a pass rather than making us more obligated, we are defying God. When we forget our being chosen as a birthright rather than accept the obligation to fulfill what we are chosen for, we are defying God. When we continue to use the words of praise and gratitude while crossing the street because we see a person different than us, when we ignore the beggar who is in need, when we ask for God’s help and deny helping our fellow human beings, we are defying God.

Yet, we seem to be incapable of accepting our two-faced ways of being. We seem to be incapable of looking in the mirror at our own mendacity, we seem to be incapable of accepting and admitting the ways we preach while eluding God and God’s will; the paths we choose so we make ourselves feel good by praising God while defying God’s call to us. Yet, we can hear Rabbi Heschel’s words and wisdom anew today. We can and must end our eluding and defying of God, of God’s will, of God’s call to us. We, the people, must look inside of ourselves and end our wonderful words of preaching while taking actions that elude God’s will, God’s teachings, the words of Moses and Christ, the actions of the prophets. We have to admit our errors, we have to do our T’Shuvah and end our deceptions, both of self and another(s), we have to make our amends to those we have harmed, and we have to change both our actions and end our desire to engage in deceiving ourselves. We, the people, have to call out the charlatans in all faith traditions, in all either/or thinking in politics, economics, religions, social media, etc. We, the people, have to call out one another when our preaching and praising eludes and defies with love and strength. We, the people, have to demand of our leaders in all walks of life truth, concern, making sure they enhance freedom for “all the inhabitants therein”, holding them to account that all people who live within our borders are part of “all the inhabitants therein” regardless of race, religion, gender, who they love, etc. We have to throw out of office the people who ‘get off’ by denigrating their enemies, lying to their people, promoting their personal agendas over what is best for the people. We have to stand up for God, we have to stop hiding from and making our falseness an altar we seem to relish worshiping at.

Rabbi Heschel’s call to us is a call that is directed to each and everyone of us. While it is easy to blame the Clergy, the political system, I hear Rabbi Heschel asking me what I am doing in my life that promotes bastardizing ideals, preaching and praising. I look at the times I praised someone so I could fleece them, prior to my recovery, prior to my return to God’s path for me. I look at the times people praised me while defying the teachings, the moments where people preached bullshit so they could elude God and responsibility. I am watching the lies of Netanyahu, Trump and their cronies/allies, the mendacity of ADL in honoring Jared Kushner, and wonder how we have fallen so far. I pray we hear Rabbi Heschel’s words and answer his call to change. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s Wisdom - A Daily Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 141

“We have trifled with the name of God. We have taken ideals in vain, preached and eluded Him, praised and defied Him. Now, we reap the fruits of failure. Through centuries His voice cried in the wilderness. How skillfully it was trapped and imprisoned in Temples! How thoroughly distorted!” (Essential Writings pg. 90)

Rabbi Heschel could be describing this moment and, I believe, this is the wonder and awe of his prophetic voice. We live at a time where our awareness of the myriad of ways “we have taken ideals in vain” seems to elude us. We hear and spout ourselves great ideals of democracy, of freedom, of faith, and then bastardize them to the greatest extent we can, all the while extolling our faithfulness to them! The word vain comes from the Latin meaning “empty, without substance” and one English definition is “useless, producing no result”. This is such an apt description of what so many people do with  the ‘ideals’ they espouse. We see this in our government, in our institutions of higher learning, in our ‘religious’ institutions, in our families, communities, etc.

As a Jew, the hatred that is happening in the world today against Jews by other people who experience hatred because of the color of their skin, because of their sexual orientation, is appalling, a sense of betrayal, a bewilderment. The extolling of Hamas under the guise of “freedom fighters” and they “care so much about the Palestinians and the people of Gaza” makes me want to scream, shout, knock some sense into these ‘well-intentioned’ idiots! Hamas, Radical Islam would kill LGBTQ+ people like dogs in the street, they massacred Jewish and non-Jewish young people at a concert dedicated to peace, they killed babies, raped women, and people validate their actions under the ideal of ‘freedom’; while Hamas and their Iranian puppet masters do not want anyone to be free! If this isn’t taking an “ideal in vain”, what is? Because they wrap themselves in what are Biblical ideals, calls from God without acknowledging where their ideals come from, the progressives like Tliab, Omar, Bowman, are all able to forget who marched with their ancestors for freedom and civil rights, who has stood for these ideals in all their affairs and, instead, abuse the Jews rather than speak about their issues with the government of Israel, with the ways Hamas has imprisoned the people of Gaza, etc. Because they are taking “ideals in vain” they cannot see the forest for the trees, they cannot acknowledge the both/and of this situation, and they are unable/unwilling to see a path forward that doesn’t mean Israel’s destruction as a Jewish State.

The evangelicals and other right-wing religious groups, including right-wing Jews, spout their love of God and of Christ, their adherence to the ways of the Bible, the New Testament, all the while the ways they act out their ‘ideals’ is “empty, lacking in substance” and they produce none of the results that Biblical ideals point us to. Rather than finding ways to live together in harmony, if not peace, these so-called ‘religious’ people bastardize the words of Christ and the Bible to “love your neighbor as you love yourself”, to “not hate your brother in your heart”, to “care for the stranger, the poor, the needy, the widow, the orphan”, they seek to divide us, they seek to bar and blame the stranger from our midst-up to an including Jews who they consider the strangest and the most culpable for societal ills, they continue to criminalize poverty and blame the poor people for their poverty because, in some circles, they say the people are unloved by God! While Biblical tradition says the gates of repentance are always open, the prophet calls us to return to the fold because God “will heal our backsliding and take us back in love”, these charlatans continue to make a life of faith into a theocracy with them being the autocrats in charge!

We, the people, have to end taking “ideals in vain” and admit that we may never achieve these ideals and we are not free to cease our pursuit of them. We, the people, have to end the tyranny of the left, of the right, and bring America, Israel, and, hopefully, the world away from the fringes, away from either end of the spectrum. This is not just a political necessity, this is a spiritual one as well. Without our acknowledgement that we will never be perfect, that the institutions we create to solve the dilemmas facing us will always make errors, that the people who create solutions to the problems we face will always have clay feet and show their imperfections, we can never truly move forward in getting closer to the “ideals” we hold dear. We, the people, have to take back our institutions from the ‘perfectionists’, from the people who erroneously believe ‘they can do no wrong’, from perpetrating the myth that the fact we have “taken ideals in vain” is okay because we are doing it. After all, the Supreme Court is taking a ridiculous case where someone says they are above the law because of their status, after all, justice for the wealthy is different than justice for the middle class and poor, health treatment is different depending on one’s economic status, etc. Yet, the “ideal” is “proclaim liberty throughout the land and to all its inhabitants therein”, it is “justice is blind”, it is “everyone an Image of God” and deserves their dignity respected and to be considered as having infinite worth. Seems like we have fallen way short of these ideals, hence the proof of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above.

We, the people, need to recover our essence of being, our basic goodness of being, our purpose for being created and alive. We have to surrender our false egos, stop taking our souls to the beauty shop so we look good on the outside. Each morning I wake up and say a prayer of gratitude to God for “returning my soul to me with compassion”, knowing today is new, I am fresh and I have to return to pursuit of God’s ideals, be one grain of sand better today and practice the ideals above a little more! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 140

“We have trifled with the name of God. We have taken ideals in vain, preached and eluded Him, praised and defied Him. Now, we reap the fruits of failure. Through centuries His voice cried in the wilderness. How skillfully it was trapped and imprisoned in Temples! How thoroughly distorted!” (Essential Writings pg. 90)

Immersing ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s words above, knowing they are from 70+ years ago, looking at our world today, one can only wonder what has prevented humanity from hearing, heeding, engaging in his teachings. Considering Rabbi Heschel is calling out to our ancestors, our family trees, and they discarded his words, failed to take action on them, is there any wonder we find ourselves in the predicament both globally and individually that we are in?

The first sentence above describes the idolatry of many so-called ‘religious’ people who use “the name of God” to validate their selfishness, their drive for power, their desire to enslave everyone to bow down to them, not God. Whether it is legislating a women’s health care away from it being her decision, keeping ‘those people’ in their place, denying the freedom of whichever group they are afraid of, continuing to build gates and walls to keep the stranger far from our borders and homes, ignoring the plight of the homeless, blaming the victim, etc these ‘religious’ people invoke “the name of God” as their reasoning.

The word “trifle” means “a thing of little value or importance” in the Oxford Dictionary and comes from the French meaning “deceit, mock, deceive”. Rabbi Heschel’s first sentence above can be understood to be saying that We have mocked, deceived, engaged in deceit with the name of God! This is a frightening statement and one which would make everyone who engages in this deceit want to hide, deny and defame the truth of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom. While he is writing in his time, he is also writing from a historical view as well as a prophetic view. What he claims is happening in the 1950’s is happening on steroids right now!

Be it politicians, Rabbis, Priests, Imams, Ministers, all have engaged in this deceit regarding what they say in “the name of God.” We have listened to these ‘spiritual leaders’ denigrate their neighbor instead of loving them, defile the words of Christ instead of feeding the poor, ignore the call of Moses to “choose life”, etc. We are witnesses to the mendacity of ‘being chosen’ as some privilege rather than an obligation. Any use of “the name of God” that is not accompanied with the laundry list of obligations that God demands of us, is by its very nature, deceitful. Any use of “the name of God” that doesn’t bind us to love, kindness, truth, compassion, rebuke, is, by its very nature a mockery of God’s name! Yet, we continue to use “the name of God” to deceive and to mock, to add followers to our folly, to create and propagate the myth of mist that says what is “in the name of God” according to our Holy Texts is false, only what they say is truly spoken “in the name of God.” This is the how and why of the disdain of religion is so prevalent in our society today-people are tired of mendacity, they are tired of hearing falseness and our spiritual homes very rarely truly teach the truthful words of God and our obligation to fulfill them.

We also see how “we have trifled with the name of God” in our homes and families. When parents teach their children that “god will punish you”, when Santa Clause doesn’t visit or give gifts to “the naughty”, when speaking of Jesus dying for their sins rather than living to teaching us to help one another, when Moses is seen as only angry rather than concerned, when rebuke is seen as a negative rather than an expression of deep faith in one’s ability to change, we are engaging in deceit, using “the name of God” to control our children, our neighbors, etc. We make a mockery of “the name of God” when we say ‘all you have to do is be reborn through a new baptism’, all you have to do is ‘convert to our way/sect/denomination and all your troubles will disappear’, and other such poppycock. We “trifle with the name of God” when we invoke God’s name to injure, diminish, harm, dismiss the image of God another person is created in, when we go along with the authoritarians who want to deny the Holocaust, who engage in anti-semitism, racism, islamaphobia, hatred of any kind. We “trifle with the name of God” when we attempt to define God, when we spout our understanding of God’s words and will as the only truth. When we define God, we are limiting God, thereby using “the name of God” to do our will instead of the other way around.

In recovery, we seek to reverse our trifling with “the name of God” and return to reverence for God, for “the name of God”. Yet, even in recovery, we deceive ourselves into believing that whatever is happening in our lives, in our world is God’s will- wrong! In my recovery, each and every day I seek to discern what is God’s will and what is my will; making sure I speak out and up(often too loudly for most) when evil/wrongdoing is happening; not letting the ‘little’ lies, deceits, happen because they are no big deal-they are a big deal. I commit each day since Dec.1986 to not make a mockery or “trifle with the name of God” ever again. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 139

“We live in an age when most of us have ceased to be shocked by the increasing breakdown in moral inhibitions. The decay of conscience fills the air with a pungent smell. Good and evil, which were once as distinguishable as day and night, have become a blurred mist. But that mist is man-made. God is not silent. He has been silenced.” (Essential Writings pg. 90)

The last three sentences above send chills up and down my spine and my soul cries out for me to cut through “that mist is man-made.” They cause me and, hopefully, everyone to look at the myriad of subtle ways we add to the mist that causes good and evil to become so mixed up. Because of the pull of self-deception and our desire to be deceived, we make up stories that are not true, believe ‘facts’ that are false, allow feelings to become facts, and seek all manners of escapes from truth, reality, commitment, obligation, and God.

Our political process is one such “mist is man-made”, we have become so oblivious to the truth that the “spin doctors” are believed as truth tellers. We believe the falseness of the right-wing and left-wing commentators even though we know, deep in the recesses of our minds and our souls, what they are saying is not truth. While there may be some true things in what they are saying, they use the truth to tell lies, to ‘hook’ us into their conspiracies and their ‘side’. Both of these ‘wings’ are authoritarian, both use God as justifications, both allow alliances to be destroyed unless people go along with the lies they tell themselves and everyone else. This is one of the ways we have silenced God.

In our faith traditions, people continue to tell us what God wants all the while denying the foundational texts of their faith. 36 times in the Torah we are told to welcome the stranger, help the poor and the needy yet, many ‘religious’ Jews speak despairingly about people of another faith, people of different ethnicities, and bastardize the very teachings they claim to be the guardians of! They continually tell us ‘what God wants’ and in doing so, they are creating more “mist” and silencing God’s voice in favor of their own. Jesus never talks about abortion, he never says to make women less than men, he washes the feet of the stranger, he feeds the poor-yet so many ‘good christians’ have bastardized his words and silenced his voice in favor of their own “mist”-making and, again, silenced God with their own voice.

It is very difficult to cut through the “mist” that is “man-made”, it is very difficult to hear God amid the noise of our minds and inner life. Yet, we can do both when we are willing to be in truth, when we are willing to take the time to discern what is good and what is evil. We, the people, need the help of God’s voice, God’s teachings, to make these discernments and, we continue to believe in the superiority of our voices, of our thoughts. Seeing the world as it is, cutting through the “mist” is the path to freedom, it is the pathway to wholeness, it is the pathway to holiness.

We are told in Leviticus: “you shall be holy because I, the Lord, am holy”. I this commentary about this verse, Ramban says we need to hear this and take this in because it is possible to be a “scoundrel within the bounds of the Torah” and therefore we need to be told/reminded that holiness is our path, holiness is something that we already have within us and our job is to grow our holy soul so we do not create more “mist”, so we do not substitute our voice for God’s voice, so we end our incessant need to silence God.

We have witnessed throughout the millennia a myriad of ways people of all stripes and kinds have been “scoundrels” within the ‘law of the land’. In our recent history, we can look to Hitler and the Nazi’s who made the law of the land fit their desires with little or no pushback from the German people nor the clergy. We are witnessing here in the United States how the right-wing ‘fringe’ have taken over the Republican Party and even the Supreme Court is siding with them! Mike Johnson, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Rashida Tliab, and other members of Congress do everything they can to create more “mist” as a smoke screen to the truth, which is always messy. They continue to validate their points of view without ever seeking to see or hear the ‘rest of the story’. Trump and his thugs have taken “mist” making to whole new level, the media constantly denigrate Joe Biden for being 81 years old-a discrimination that even the progressives go along with, Netanyahu and his band of so-called religious parties have tried to make the legal process in Israel subservient to the political. Iran, Russia, China, and many other countries have legal systems and religious systems that are jokes. Yet, all claim to be speaking in the name of God-all speak only in the name of their self-interest which is the exact opposite of God’s call to us. Many people have silenced God because of the ways of these so-called ‘religious’ people.

In recovery, I and my fellow travelers recapture God’s call, we take the cotton out of our ears, we take the blinders off our eyes, we open our hearts and silence the constant noise of our heads so we can discern what is truth and what is good separating from the lies we have told ourselves, the deceptions of another we have bought into, and the evil we have perpetrated prior to our recovery. I have spent the past 35+ years undoing the evil I did, letting go of the self-deceptions and lies I bought into. I still make mistakes, I just don’t have to lie about them, I don’t hide from being who I am, as messy as this is. I have encountered many people who want to keep the “mist” as thick as they can so they can hide from themselves and everyone else their errors, their betrayals and, in doing so continue to silence God. Isn’t it time to end our “mist” making ways? God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 138

“We live in an age when most of us have ceased to be shocked by the increasing breakdown in moral inhibitions. The decay of conscience fills the air with a pungent smell. Good and evil, which were once as distinguishable as day and night, have become a blurred mist. But that mist is man-made. God is not silent. He has been silenced.” (Essential Writings pg. 90)

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above about “Good and evil” are as true today as they were when he wrote them some 73+ years ago! It seems as if society has lost its ability to distinguish between them. While it had “become a blurred mist” then, it seems as if they have become so blended together it is more difficult to distinguish them, it is  more like the early evening sky than only a “blurred mist”. Every one seems to have their own belief and understanding of what is “good and evil”, people proclaim their way is the only right way, what we learn in the Bible, what we learn about being decent, being human has become so distorted in the ways of so many that many people question their own vision of what is “good and evil”. We are so lost in the darkness of the early evening sky, we have lost our way and the ensuing angst, negativity, evil doings seem to be multiplying.

Social media gets a lot of the blame today because anyone can say anything and millions of people ‘see’ their lies and their obfuscation of truth, their denial of what is good and right, their upholding of evil ideas and ways for the benefit of their own power, their own bias’, etc. Yet, while this is true, we have been confounded by the “blurred mist” for a lot longer. Throughout the ages people have believed “might is right” and because of the belief in “survival of the fittest” also includes the people who can conquer another, who can imprison truth and good, who enslave those they fear, we have blurred the lines between good and evil for the millennia.

At Hanukkah we sing a song “Mi Yimalel” (who can retell) and it says “in every age a hero or sage came to our aid”. Today, “good and evil” have become so indistinguishable that, for a great many people, their heroes and sages are the perpetrators of blurring the lines between “good and evil” and, in fact, trying and, in many cases, succeeding to convince ‘their people’ that what is evil is in fact good! Be it Trump today, Pharaoh in the Bible, the Priests and Kings at the time of the prophets, Putin, Netanyahu, any of the dictators and despots of earlier times, all of these ‘leaders’ use subterfuge and mendacity to cover up the evil they perpetrate upon their people and their ‘enemies’. Their ‘enemies’ being anyone who stands up for good, who calls out the evil, who cares for and takes care of the poor, the needy, the stranger; who stands up against hatred and violence, who makes clear the line between good and evil.

We are in desperate need as a society for “the hero or sage” to come to our aid. We are in even more desperate need for us as a society to allow the ones who are here to be heard and heeded. Whether it is the Bible, the New Testament, the Koran, be it Rabbi Heschel, Dr. King, the Dalai Lama, Ticht Nhat Han, John Pavlovitz, Rev. William Barber, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Ernest Kurtz, M. Scott Peck, so many more, we have the “hero or sage” who can come to our aid-we just have to allow them to penetrate our hearts, our minds, our souls; we have to take off the armor surrounding our beings and “circumcise the foreskins of our hearts”, we have to “Hear Israel” by opening our ears and we have to surrender our need to be in power, our desire to live in self-deception, our longing to ‘be strong’. Our greatest strength is our ability to “fail forward”, to learn from our errors, make our amends repair the damage and set ourselves on the proper path for serving something greater than ourselves. The only path to achieving this way of being, the only path to hearing and following “the hero or sage” who comes to our aid is by doing our own inner work. We are constantly being called to look inside of our selves, to discern the deceptions, the lies, the mendacity we have allowed to take hold of our minds and emotions so we can heal them through our spirits. We have to engage in the process of spiritual healing, rise above our false pride, our need to be right, our love of blurring the lines between “good and evil”, blow away the mist that seems to blind us to truth and goodness.

The road of spiritual healing begins with an admission that we are sick, we have become so “fat” that we are unable to discern what is good and what is evil. We have become so obsessed with our own false goals and worship our own false gods, we have engaged in such mendacity as to believe “the one with the gold rules”, until we admit our erroneous thinking and acting, we can’t begin to heal. Once we have admitted our errors, we then need to let go of our old ideas even though we have deceived ourselves into believing these old ideas were good for us. We let them go by deepening our spiritual practices, immersing ourselves in whatever moral and spiritual path speaks to us, even combining some of them to make a practice we can live into. We then return to a state of moral living, of learning/re-learning the difference between “good and evil”, we end our blurring the lines by having a firm grasp on truth and decency. We practice being of service instead of being served, we see one another as divine images and respect the dignity of another human being as much as we are respecting our own dignity. We no longer need to prove our worth to anyone including ourselves, we just know we are worthy, we are equal and we are unique. We hear the call of the prophet, the call of our neighbor, the call of truth and the call of morality in all of our affairs. This is recovery, this is making “good and evil” “as distinguishable as night and day.” Doing this makes each of us “the hero or sage” we need today, the redeemer we are desperate for and the “freedom fighter” to lead us our of our self-imposed slavery and prisons. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 137

“We live in an age when most of us have ceased to be shocked by the increasing breakdown in moral inhibitions. The decay of conscience fills the air with a pungent smell. Good and evil, which were once as distinguishable as day and night, have become a blurred mist. But that mist is man-made. God is not silent. He has been silenced.” (Essential Writings pg. 90)

Speaking the words of the second sentence above:”the decay of conscience fills the air with a pungent smell” engages two senses; hearing and smelling. By saying these words and hearing them we have an opportunity to smell “the air” and take in the “pungent smell” of our decay of conscience in order to end our self-deception of believing we are “stopping and smelling the roses”! We have fooled ourselves for so long, we have bought into the deceptions of another, of society that our morality has grown and, even though we are going against the teachings of the Bible, even though we are ignoring the words of the prophet, we are morally superior to any other generation! Remembering these words were published in 1951, some 73 years ago, should give us pause as to the mendacity we are living in, the self-deception we have fallen into and the loss of our sense of smell, sense of hearing, sense of seeing we have suffered.

The world stinks! We have polluted our air with more than chemicals, the O-Zone layer of conscience has holes drilled into it and we are ignoring this “pungent smell”. Mendacity has altered our senses, our conscience in such a way that we disbelieve the wisdom of Rabbi Heschel, we disbelieve the actions of Rev. Martin Luther King, we hear denials of the Holocaust, we watch as people emulate Nazi Germany and Hitler believing these charlatans want what is best for us. We are so lost we don’t even know what is up and what is down, we are so confused we have forgotten that the 2nd Temple was destroyed because of Sinat Hinam” - senseless hatred, we ignore the teachings of the Rabbis that the 1st Temple was destroyed because of the mistreatment of the widows, the orphans, the poor, the needy, we treat the stranger the same way as they did in Sodom and Gemorrah and believe we are right! We seek to imprison different groups of people in subtle and not-so-subtle ways and deny our acting like Pharaoh, who did not know Abraham Lincoln, do not know of the Civil War, etc.

We keep spraying perfume to cover up the “pungent smell” of the air around us and we fail to fix the wholes in our conscience and the conscience of the world. We wrap ourselves in our “identity politics”, in our so-called faith, in our adherence to tradition which belies what the Bible say, makes a mockery of Jesus’ words, seeks to undo the progress we have made in fulfilling the words “all men are created equal”. We lie, cheat, steal, commit plagiarism, bastardize truth, spout “alternative facts”, worship at the feet of dictators, ignore and dishonor the people who have created places of holiness, houses of help, and pound our chests with how we are the only ‘ones who know’ what is good and what is true, we are the keepers of The Word, all the while practicing idolatry, deception, mendacity.

We, the people, have to do a spring cleaning. We, the people, have to take stock of what is and separate the “wheat from the chaff”. We, the people, have to smash the perfume bottles that have covered up the “decay of conscience” the “pungent smell” that has been in our world for far too long. We, the people, are being called by Rabbi Heschel’s words, by the actions of the prophet, the ways of Christ to rid our Temples, our Churches, our Mosques, our governments of these ‘money-changers’, these liars, these destroyers. We don’t have to wait for a messiah, we have to take action right here and right now. Rabbi Heschel, Rev. King, the Berrigan Brothers, Rabbi Joachim Prinz, Bobby Kennedy, Rev. Barber, et al, teach us, as Rabbi Prinz says in his March on Washington Speech in 1963:

The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful, the most tragic problem is silence.” Rabbi Heschel refuses to stay silent, even today more than 50 years since his death, he calls out to We, the people, with a demand and a disturbance, with awakening thunder and unwavering hope and belief in the goodness of humanity. We have to stop patting ourselves on the back, we have to stop lulling ourselves into false beliefs and clean out our nostrils and smell the “decay of conscience”, we have to see the smog covering our decency, our humanity, our inner life so we can repair the damage of so many years of decay-we are not rotten to the core, yet.

I hear Rabbi Heschel call us to recover our humanity, recover our conscience, which is exactly the goal of the recovery movement. It is the reason God put T’Shuvah into the world-not because, as some believe, we are supposed to be perfect-rather because God knew/knows we lose our way, our senses become dull and we need a way back, we need a path of recovering our humanity and repairing the damages we have wrought. Along this path of repair, change and hope, we are commanded to forgive another person and to forgive ourselves. Immersing ourselves in being human does not mean being perfect, it means we strive to be “one grain of sand better” each day. It means we make a 2% shift from 49% wanting to and knowing how to repair the “decay of conscience (that) fills the air” to 51% taking the actions we know will make the necessary repairs and changes to the ways we live so the “air” is filled with the sweetness of being human, our conscience and the  conscience of the world is repaired and we can change our way of living to meet the hopes and dreams of God, of goodness, of decency, of freedom for all. We see this happening throughout the country and we need to enlarge the ways people are doing this instead of making everything corporate, worrying about “advice of counsel”, getting even through lies. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 136

“We live in an age when most of us have ceased to be shocked by the increasing breakdown in moral inhibitions. The decay of conscience fills the air with a pungent smell. God and evil, which were once as distinguishable as day and night, have become a blurred mist. But that mist is man-made. God is not silent. He has been silenced.” (Essential Writings pg. 90)

Rabbi Heschel writes these words in the 1950’s and rather than heeding his call, rather than hearing his prophetic vision and words, we have sunk deeper and deeper into “the increasing breakdown in moral inhibitions”. Against the backdrop of the victory of World War II, during the “baby boomer” generation, the people who Tom Brokaw calls “the greatest generation” believed they were above the evil and the immorality of Nazi Germany. Yet, Rabbi Heschel is seeing behind the curtain of the facade people put up, he is seeing the racism, the anti-semitism, the self-deception of people and calling it out.

What will it take for us “to be shocked by the increasing breakdown in moral inhibitions”? We are so far down the rabbit hole that we hear conservatives blame music, the arts, the way women dress, ‘the libs’ for this “breakdown”, all the while remaining oblivious and/or willfully blind to their cruelty towards anyone not like them, engaging in denying the right to vote to ‘those people’, legislating against good health care, criminalizing poverty, unwelcoming the stranger, all in the name of ‘religion’. We are witnesses to this “breakdown” as well as participants! Yet, we seem incapable of responding to the wisdom of Rabbi Heschel above, we seem unwilling to take a stand for what is right and what is moral, blaming God, society, another group, anyone but ourselves.

The “sexual revolution” is blamed for “the increasing breakdown”, rock and roll music and Elvis Presley were blamed for it, rap music, the civil rights movement, the ending of quotas on Jews, and so many more advances in society are being blamed for this “breakdown in moral inhibitions” when the truth is that greed and power are at the core it. Authoritarianism, dictatorship, legislative power, the power of the purse are the rot that has allowed this “breakdown in moral inhibitions”. The idea: “the one with the gold rules” can be traced to antiquity and, instead of heeding the words of the Bible, instead of acting like Jesus, people throughout the millennia have abused these words and deeds for their own gain, for their own power, to enrich themselves and blamed everyone else for the ills of society. We are seeing this happen again, only on steroids by the “good christian, religious Jews, devout muslims’!

Blame the victim is the battle cry of our generation, it is the drug addicts fault that he/she dies of an overdose of Fentanyl, it is the poor person’s fault that he steals a loaf of bread, it is the person’s fault they get cancer from asbestos, it is …. We are incapable of being shocked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and, some in our country believe Ukraine should just surrender and become a satellite of Russia again-forgoing their freedom, welcoming the people who have raped and pillaged their country, killed their citizens, kidnapped their children. There are those who believe Hamas cares about freedom for the Gazans, who think what they did on October 7 was just and right, they are freedom fighters who gave Israel what it deserved! There are demonstrations across the world and especially in our country that are hailed by ‘the progressives’ as good, making Jews unsafe in their dorm rooms, in their homes, their houses of worship is a good thing for these ‘progressives’ who ask for money for Jews to fund their drive for education, for health care, to fight against the oppression of women, people of color, etc. These ‘progressives’ have decided that they are the paragons of morality, they are the last defense before the total “breakdown of all moral inhibitions” all the while being morally corrupt, supporting these ‘freedom fighters of Hamas’ who kill their own people, who discriminate against LGBTQ+, who have stolen all the money given to build Gaza up so they can attack Israel, annihilate the Jews, and, of course, built lavish places for their leaders to live in both in Gaza and Qatar.

Our inability “to be shocked at the increasing breakdown of moral inhibitions” is bringing us dangerously close to totalitarianism, to believing ‘only I can save you’. Our inability has caused a large portion of our country to deny truth, to follow a madman who only wants power and who’s drive is deny freedom to the masses and share power with other authoritarians and dictators. Our ability to have true friendships where we speak truth to one another, to be able to rebuke one another when we are screwing up, when we are adding to the moral decay, our taking of our own inventory and making amends dwindles more each and every day. We get angry with the people who point out truth to us, we adopt a ‘who do you think you are’ attitude when called out on our bullshit and lies, we seek to crush anyone and everyone who tries to make us look in the mirror and see truth.

I am hearing Rabbi Heschel calling us to the task of ending our “breakdown of moral inhibitions”, I hear him calling us to “recover the questions” which is the first subchapter of his book God in Search of Man. I hear Rabbi Heschel demanding we live into recovering our humanity, our sobriety of living, recovering our connection with God, with the Ineffable One, and recovering a sense of community and purpose that the Bible teaches us to have. I hear him echoing the words of the Torah, “care for the poor, the needy, orphan, and the widow; welcome the stranger, you shall have one law for the citizen and the stranger alike, etc.” We can recover our humanity, our morality, our decency-the question before is are we willing? God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 135

“The major folly of this view seems to lie in its shifting the responsibility for man’s plight from man to God, in accusing the Invisible though the iniquity is ours. Rather than admit our own guilt, we seek, like Adam, to shift the blame upon someone else. For generations we have been investing life with ugliness and now we wonder why we do not succeed. God was thought of as a watchman hired to prevent us from using our loaded guns. Having failed us in this, He is now thought of as the ultimate scapegoat.” (Essential Writings pg. 90)

Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above describes the inner turmoil that happens to every human being. “We have been investing life with ugliness and now we wonder why we do not succeed” roils through our inner lives and our minds. We, humans, continue to do the same thing over and over again and wonder why life is not better-we are following Einstein’s definition of insanity and calling it sane. What makes this all the worse, in my opinion, is that many of our clergy are leading the way into the ugliness we witness and experience!

Believing that there is only one way to serve God and that one way is my way gives many so-called ‘religious’ people a surefire path to ugliness as we have witnessed throughout the millennia-from antiquity through today. Yet, we continue to find new and more inventive ways to promote and invest in ugliness through anti-semitism, anti-muslim, anti-christian, anti-catholic, anti-eastern philosophy. These anti’s are fueled by both the secular and the ‘religious’ leaders seeking absolute power over their ‘flock’. They spread mendacity and deception, they call their blind followers to action through hatred of “the other”, they promote fear of anyone ‘not like us’ and promote all manners of destructive behavior, including participating in Jan.6th, denying aid to Ukraine, calling Hamas ‘freedom fighters’, extolling Putin and Russia, welcoming Orban, promoting fascism, etc. When they ‘lose’ they seek to blame “stolen election”, the Jews, the Blacks, the Latinos, every different “the other” they can and their followers believe them!

Politics and religion have combined to create the exact state of affairs that the founding fathers of America were concerned about and the Supreme Court, the Congress, some State Legislatures falsely claim they are “strict constitutionalists”! They imbue the air with ugliness, we have confused good and evil to such an extent that we are unaware of the ugliness even those of us who are not under the ether of these charlatans get confused. The shifting of blame has reached such a crescendo, that the deceivers, the ‘good christian folk’, the ‘religious Jews’, the ‘devout muslims’ have convinced their followers that God wants them to be ugly, God wants them to be evil, God wants them to poison the souls of people and the world! What an ingenious way to shift the blame for their ugliness onto God, onto anyone and everyone else but them. This lack of responsibility, this denial of truth is crushing the soul of freedom, murdering the spirit of being human.

We, the people, have to deal with our inner turmoil in healthier ways. We see people practicing Yoga as a way to clear their mind, they go to Zen, to Church, to the Mosque, to Synagogue to find ways to deal with their inner turmoil only to be sent to therapy. The inner turmoil most of us suffer from is not pathological, it is spiritual in nature. We are seeking to find a way to freedom from the inner pharaoh we all have, we are seeking an experience like crossing the Red Sea, we are seeking enlightenment like we received at Sinai. What we are getting from our institutions is, instead, dogma, blame, finger pointing, falseness and being told that God doesn’t love us because we are not rich, not pretty, not famous, etc. We are getting that welcoming the stranger doesn’t apply here, caring for the poor and the needy is not what we think it is, women are inferior beings who have to be managed by men, LGBTQ+ is anathema to God, we are not all created in the Image of God nor are we all created equal! “How does this make you feel” is a normative response from therapists-These lies, this shifting of blame to God, to another human, to another group, MAKES many of us ANGRY, CRAZY, and MAKES US WANT TO SHOUT FROM THE MOUNTAIN TOP- LIAR LIAR. Yet, doing this only makes me more vulnerable, doing this allows people to discount the truth of our words. We are in a conundrum, some of us are experiencing the experience of the prophets, speaking truth to power and being shunned because of it, watching the inner turmoil of each person and the whole community turn to rot from the inside out and cause the destruction of freedom, of their holy soul, of their service to God.

Blaming God for this is the easy way out. “This must be God’s will” is an easy answer to the ills and the Oys of life, just as it is an easy answer as to why the bad seems to flourish and the bad things happen to good people. Believing that everything that happens in God’s world is for our own good is a nice statement-it doesn’t take into account that we are living in a world created by us humans! We have the Bible, we have the history books, we have the experiences passed down by our ancestors of hatred, of pogroms, of concentration camps, of sneak attacks, of broken covenants, and we forget that God doesn’t want us to lie, cheat, steal, make false images of God nor ourselves, that God doesn’t want us to murder our souls, to steal from ourselves nor anyone else, doesn’t want us to bear false witness, to whore ourselves nor covet what another person has. God wants us to “want what we have” and then grow what we have, God wants us to fulfill our divine calling, to live with purpose and passion, with truth and love, to remember “You will be Holy” - not as a future deal, but as something to engage in right here, right now. Lets us all end the blame game, the lying game and the ugliness we have created. Lets clean up our acts and God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 134

“The major folly of this view seems to lie in its shifting the responsibility for man’s plight from man to God, in accusing the Invisible though the iniquity is ours. Rather than admit our own guilt, we seek, like Adam, to shift the blame upon someone else. For generations we have been investing life with ugliness and now we wonder why we do not succeed. God was thought of as a watchman hired to prevent us from using our loaded guns. Having failed us in this, He is now thought of as the ultimate scapegoat.” (Essential Writings pg. 90)

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above calls all of us to account. We are witnesses and participants in our lack of responsibility, we are guilty of this crime of blame and denial in a myriad of ways. When something bad/wrong happens, we ask God “why is this happening” instead of asking ourselves the same question. When we denigrate the humanity of another, when we deny agency to women, to minorities, to the masses, we use God as our excuse. We constantly engage in “shift the blame upon someone else” and never admit our responsibility nor our guilt.

This way of being results in “making a false image of God” in direct disobedience of the 2nd Commandment and it is done by ‘the faithful’, by ‘spiritual leaders’ by the idolators and charlatans who are running our religious institutions and our governments! It also results in people moving farther and farther away from God’s will, denying the existence of God and having many believe that reliance on our ‘humanity’ is enough. It is laughable to witness the words of the people who believe we don’t need a higher power, that God, being invisible, is just a “crutch” for ‘the weak’, when we are witnesses to the incredible paths of “man’s inhumanity to man” throughout the millennia. To validate our bad behavior, to validate our false image of God, we use the name of God - how ironic, how sad, how dangerous.

We are living in the “major folly” more today than when Rabbi Heschel wrote these words. He wrote them in the shadow of the Shoah, in the shadow of Nazi Germany which, in the 1930’s was considered the height of learning, society, etc. Today, we have dictators like Putin, Orban, MBS, along with the terrorists like Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah, the White Supremacists, who use God to validate their bad behavior and claim their behaviors are holy, just, merciful, etc! They are incapable of taking responsibility for their bad actions towards the people of their country nor towards the rest of the world, they are incapable of admitting guilt because they have bought their own bullshit and believe they are doing the will of God by oppressing their own people, spreading disinformation and lies about other people, fomenting war and dissent in democracies and working together to ‘take over the world’. We here in America are not immune to this way of being. Just as in the 1930’s when Father Coughlin was extolling Nazi Germany and trying to foment a move towards Fascism in our country, just as in the 1950’s and 60’s clergy were opposed to Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights movement, just as today when there are elected officials and clergy seeking to spread their prejudice towards LGBTQ+, people of color, Jews, anyone not like them, we hear their call that ‘god tells them to do this’ and rather than call them out for their lies, their deceptions, their lack of responsibility, their guilt in the deaths of so many, we ignore, we shrug our shoulders, we stay silent. This is the crime many people commit-silence when God is blamed, used to promote authoritarianism, prejudice, when God is blamed for the cancer of the soul of humanity that is spreading and metastasizing throughout humankind.

We have the power to end this folly, we have the inner strength to stop our shifting of blame, we are capable of seeing our responsibility and changing our course of living. Being created in the Image of God, we have within us the spirit of God, the call of our Yetzer Tov to control and manage our Yetzer Hara-both of which are necessary parts of being human. We have the duty and our very existence as free people depend on our standing up against the dictators, the authoritarians, the charlatans, the idolators and standing up for the “Invisible” One. We, the people, have to take to the streets, like we did during the civil rights movement, and march against the oppression of irresponsibility, we have to protest the lies and the narrow view of God, of humans, of identity politics, of ‘christian nation’, of the supremacy of any race, creed, religion, over another. We have made ourselves into Pharaohs who “do not know Joseph” and do “not know God”. Instead we set ourselves up to be god, to claim only we know the will of god, all the while it is Avodah Zarah, idol worship that we are participating in.

This change has to begin within each individual. We have to “do the work” and relive the moments of crossing the Red Sea, of standing at Sinai and once again proclaim “we will do and then we will understand”. We have to recommit to the covenant with God to take the actions even though we do not understand the ‘reasoning’, we surrender to a truth that is greater than we can comprehend, a way of being that goes against some aspects of our nature and our intellect. We are exercising our spiritual knowledge and growing our inner power to override the call to veto God’s will in favor of our own. Three times a day we commit to “not follow our hearts and our eyes to whore after them”. This is the recovery movement everyone needs to join. None of us are immune to the “folly” Rabbi Heschel is describing-from the ‘greatest’ to the lowest, from the rich to the poor, from the leaders to the workers/followers. This is the reason it is so crucial for the hierarchy of institutions, especially religious ones, to live the principles upon which Moses, Jesus, Mohammed taught. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 133

“At no time has the earth been so soaked with blood. Fellowmen have turned out to be evil spirits, monstrous and weird. Does not history look like a stage for the dance of might and evil-with man’s wits too feeble to separate the two and God either directing the play or indifferent to it?” (Essential Writings pg. 89)

These words, published in 1951, and speaking after the Second World War, are as prevalent today as they were then. Rabbi Heschel is calling us to look at ourselves, at our world, at our faith. Given the wars being fought externally-between nations, between nations and terrorists, we also have to look at the wars being fought internally-within a human being and within countries. Our earth is as soaked with blood today as it has ever been and, unfortunately, we hear the call of ‘religious’ people saying it is God’s will, it is God’s “wake-up call” to the faithful.

Rather than seek healing, rather than finding a just solution to the ills of humanity, we hear the people at the extremes screaming that their way is God’s will and their way is the only way. Armed with this belief, these ‘faithful’ people “have turned out to be evil spirits, monstrous and weird”. Yet, too many people sit idly by, either wringing their hands or watching to see who ‘wins’. What is it that drives human beings to be such evil spirits when we are created in the Image of God? Have we become so immune to the suffering of another that we justify the taking of life as God’s will? Have we become so deaf as to not hear the cries of the poor, the needy, the stranger, the widow, the orphan? Have we become so blind that we are unable to see how our actions and inactions, our directing and our indifference gives aid and comfort to the oppressor-both externally and the Pharaoh inside of us?

Rabbi Heschel’s words above disturb me greatly, they depict a way of being that has persisted through out history-indifference, blame, mendacity. We do not have “to be evil spirits”, we do not have dance the “dance of might and evil”, our “wits” are not “too feeble to separate the two”. It is that we have “become fat and kicked”, we “have become thick”, “covered with fatness” and we “have forsook God”, making true Moses’ prophecy in Deut. 32:15. Just as in the 1950’s when everyone thought we were so advanced and Rabbi Heschel reminded us then we were still living in an “earth..so stoked with blood”, so too today in 2024, we are living in an “earth…so soaked with blood” and have come to regard this as normal. How sad, how scary, how mendacious!

We do not have to continue in this vein, we have the power within us to rise above the evil in our hearts, we have the power to override the rumblings of our mind and heart with the truth in our souls. We have the power for our Yetzer Tov to tame and use our Yetzer Hara for service rather than power and greed, for caring rather than callousness and bloodshed. We have the choice each and every day: do we use feeble wits and go along with the lies of the ‘religious’ that this is God directing this “play” and our response is to kill another in the name of God? Do we continue to believe the lies of the progressives that God is indifferent and it is up to us to punish ‘those people’ and win the day?

This paragraph is the opening to a large discussion about “the Hiding God” and, as I originally quoted it, I did not realize the full impact it is having on me. We are witnesses to the lies of the Republican Party as it is constituted today with so many decent and true Republicans who stand for, or used to stand for, the principles that George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln espoused, being silent, being indifferent to the crassness, the attack on democracy that abounds today in their Party. Listening to the ‘religious right’ which is a false characterization of the people associated with this ‘wing of the party’, one could believe that the actions taken today by their leader and the people who support him are messianic actions, that they are sanctioned by God to make people less free, to make authoritarianism a right of some people so they can enslave and abuse most people! Listening to the progressive faction, which seeks progress for the underdog of the moment rather than progress towards God’s vision, the prophet’s vision of what the world can be, one could believe that there is no God, that God is silent and hiding and indifferent to what happens to humanity. Both of these idolatrous are lies, are deceptions for the sake of power-not for the sake of humankind.

We are in our current turmoil because we did not listen and heed Rabbi Heschel’s words in the 1950’s up till now. Israel’s government is a horror show, Hamas and their supporters in the Middle East, in Europe, in America are propagandists and terrorists who wrap themselves in the flag of victimhood, hence the embrace of the progressives who say nothing about Oct. 7th, who say nothing about the Hostages that go against the Geneva Convention-yet Hamas, the UN workers who helped and supported the terrorist attack are not held accountable by these progressives. We are in our current turmoil, our current “earth.. so soaked with blood” because we have allowed fundamentalists of all kinds to spout the evil and hatred that is in their hearts and too many people joined in the evil and far too many people remained indifferent.

We need to look inside of ourselves as individuals and as communities and recover our basic goodness of being. We have to recover the spirit that overwhelmed us at Sinai, at the Red Sea, we have to recover the words of the prophets that live in our hearts, our mouths, our souls. We have to, as Moses exhorts us to, CHOOSE LIFE! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 132

“There are no proofs for the existence of the God of Abraham. There are only witnesses. The greatness of the prophet lies not only in the ideas he expressed, but also in the moments he experienced. The prophet is a witness, and his words a testimony to His power and judgement, to His justice and mercy.”(Essential Writings pg. 64)

Thinking about the last phrase above, I hear Rabbi Heschel calling out to us to end our belief that the “justice” and “mercy” we practice is the same as “His justice and mercy”. The prophet came as a gift from the Ineffable One to help us re-align our human practice of justice and mercy with “His justice and mercy.” We have failed to heed the demand of the prophet and the hope of God throughout the millennia. Yet, by hearing “his words a testimony” we can re-align our practice of justice and mercy with the practice of “His justice and mercy.”

To do this we have to, first, let go of our hubris and our deep-seated belief that we know what is just and what is merciful on our own thinking, with our own prejudices. This belief is based, in large part, on our spiritual bankruptcy, the lack of spiritual knowledge, spiritual maturity, living by our spiritual experiences. This belief, also in large part, is based on our reliance on our intellect, on our emotions, on our need to hold power over another. We have to surrender our reliance on our intellect alone, realize our intellect is only a part of us, be grateful for the gift of our intellect, and make it subservient to our “intuitive mind” as Einstein calls our “gut instinct’, that teachers and spiritual leaders like Dr. King, Thomas Merton, Rabbi Heschel, etc call our soul’s knowledge.

God’s “justice and mercy” is based on teaching, on helping people return to their rightful place, live a life of kindness, concern, love and truth, compassion and service. Throughout the Bible, God doesn’t want ‘bad’ things to happen to people, God calls out to us on numerous occasions to return, God gives us prophecy through Moses and the prophets as to what will happen if we “stay fat” and forget who we are, who we serve, and what our purpose is. While many people call ‘the god of the old testament’ an angry god, they are only practicing Avodah Zarah, idolatry. Labelling God, limiting God is the worst sin, I believe. It is the sin of believing one can be better than God, it is the sin of believing one can control God, it is the sin of believing that God will take care of them only, that their cause, their way is the only right way, and this makes these people authoritarians, dictators, theocrats, etc, to the ruination of “His justice and mercy.”

Throughout “his words a testimony”, the prophet calls for us to return, to let go of our false beliefs, selfish ideals, harmful treatment of the widow, the stranger, the orphan, the needy, the poor, one another. The prophet reminds us of our covenant with God, that God is God and we are not. The prophet is a witness to a power greater than ourselves which most people, including the Priesthood and the Royalty who are named servants by and of God, ignore, denigrate, believe they are not bound by the same rules because they “the chosen”. We are still spreading this deceit today; in our political world, in our business world, in our personal world-to the defeat of democracy, to the ending of freedom for all.

God’s mercy is so great, as the prophet testifies to, that all we, the people, have to do is return, admit our errors, sincerely be remorseful, ask for forgiveness, and make a plan not to commit the exact same error in the same manner again. Yet, we, the people, seem incapable of allowing God’s mercy to overwhelm us, we seem to disbelieve the testimony of the prophet, we denigrate what he is a witness to and we discard his call to us. Again, at our own peril, we complain about God’s strict justice instead of hearing the command to engage in “righteous justice”, to temper justice with mercy, to be quick to forgive. We, the people, seem to relish in our resentments, we continually find what is wrong with another, be judgmental and call it justice, be unwilling to believe ‘a leopard can change its spots’, and live a ‘holier than thou’ existence. What rubbish, what hubris, to believe we can go down the same path as our ancestors from Antiquity and not experience the same result.

There is a solution- “His justice and mercy” is found in the principle of T’Shuvah! Each day, we are taught by Rabbi Eliezer, we should do T’Shuvah- take an inventory of what we have done well,, where we have missed the mark, make a plan to not repeat our errors, make our sincere amends to those we have harmed, make a plan to enhance what we do well and be grateful for the spiritual growth we make from being aware of both our misses and our hits. Each year we are supposed to do this with God on Yom Kippur, yet most people only give lip service to this holiest of days. God’s “justice and mercy” is so great, as the prophet witnesses, that even knowing most confessions, most vows made on Yom Kippur are not done wholeheartedly, God accepts them because of the belief that, one day we will circumcise the foreskins of our hearts forever. God is slow to anger and quick to forgive, abundant in lovingkindness, in need of our return from our self-imposed exile.

Isn’t it time for us to return? The recovery movement is based in God’s loving mercy and justice, God’s forgiveness and desire for our return. My recovery began in prison because Rabbi Mel Silverman, z”l, taught us about T’Shuvah and gave us a path back to decency, to family, to community, to God. I find it sad that many people who ‘think they are normal’ and in charge of institutions that are supposed to be spiritual, don’t believe in this basic tenet of spirituality; the “Spirituality of Imperfection” as the book is called. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s Wisdom - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 131

“There are no proofs for the existence of the God of Abraham. There are only witnesses. The greatness of the prophet lies not only in the ideas he expressed, but also in the moments he experienced. The prophet is a witness, and his words a testimony to His power and judgement, to His justice and mercy.”(Essential Writings pg. 64)

Humanity seems to ignore the teaching and wisdom of Rabbi Heschel above, and truth be told throughout his writings, in favor of following the false witnesses of the false gods power and judgment, the idols false promises of justice and mercy. When the Israelites and the other slaves who left Egypt crossed the Red Sea, they proclaimed: “This is my God, there is no God like Adonai”  yet throughout our history we seem to run to believe the isolators, the deceivers, the people who tell us what we think we want to hear rather than hear, take in, and believe the testimony of the the prophet.

It is so ridiculous to ignore the prophet’s “words a testimony to His power and judgement”. Yet we do at our own peril and at the cost to everyone around us, we continue to deny what “the prophet is a witness” to with our refusal to hear his testimony as truth and follow through on “his words”. Rather, we find a myriad of ways to make what some in Jewish learning call “a midrashic move”, taking the words of the prophet slightly or broadly out of context to make the point they want to make rather than see what the prophet saw, respond to the inequities of human behaviors and justice as the prophet does and also testify to “His power and His judgement”.

And we continue to fall short of their testimony, we continue to bastardize their words so much, people have come to believe that Donald Trump is sent by god, because they are idol worshipers and being led by clergy who are false witnesses. We are so far from hearing “a testimony to His power and His judgement” when we can believe that Nikki Haley is woman who cares about people while knowing she is being backed by the same people who have come up with the 2025 project, the same White Christian Nationalists that support Trump, there is no difference in how either one of these administrations would treat the widow, the stranger, the poor, the orphan, the needy, etc while accusing all illegal immigrants of bringing Fentynal across the border while winking at the wealthy donors who have exploited the crisis through their price gouging of medications, their making recovery a business rather than a mission, lying, cheating and denying responsibility for their crimes while paying massive fines.

These fine ‘good-Christian’ folk like Mike Johnson who denies the testimony of the very prophets that Jesus quotes and learned from, Lindsey Graham, Jim Jordan, Ted Cruz, et al all claim to ‘love the Bible’, ‘I listen to a higher authority’ speech’s while denying the power and judgement of God that the prophet testifies to; the power of forgiveness, the judgement to “heal their backsliding”, the power to impact the soul of an individual, to fill one’s heart with remorse and regret in order to return to His covenant, in order to forgive oneself for our errors rather than blame another for our mistakes. Rather than falsely proclaim what the Bible says, maybe these ‘leaders’, these charlatans, these power-hungry lackeys should actually read the Bible, immerse themselves in the “testimony” of the prophet, witness the world through the eyes of the prophet and approach the sacred task of leadership with a little more humility.

We are witnessing the same bastardization and false testimony by the right wing in Israel. Ben-G’Vir, Smoetrich, Netanyahu and their allies, the settlers, the Ultra Orthodox Rabbis and their students who, since the day of the Oslo Accords, have denigrated the vision and testimony of the prophet, who have called for the death of Yitzhak Rabin because he sought a path to peace, who continue to make these ‘midrashic moves’ so they can advance an agenda that does not adhere to a testimony where “his words a testimony to His power and His judgement”. Rather, as the prophet says: “On that day God will be One and God’s name One”, should be what we strive for-but authoritarians never want harmony, they never want democracy, they call for an end to messiness, they call for an end to freedom for the masses and only for themselves.

The prophet calls to us with his testimony to recover our ability to seek forgiveness, to accept God’s power to forgive, to recover our ability to see clearly enough to judge ourselves truthfully-not harshly nor softly. When we recover the words and power of the prophet, we in recovery experience life as he did; with wonder, awe, consternation, sadness, joy and truthfulness. We are recovering our humanity which is what God’s power is all about, I believe, tapping into the divine power and dignity we are created with so we can be more human each and every day-our recovery is from our inability to be human for a time and now we are repeating and living into the testimony of the prophet because we know “no human power could have saved us”.

I think about the power and judgement of God with wonder and awe. I am a recipient of this power to change and the judgement to see truth and be accepted back into the fold because of my T’Shuvah and be a witness to the T’Shuvah of tens of thousands people over the years. The prophet, while abrasive and single-minded, comes to testify that change is possible, forgiveness is attainable and we can recover our dignity, our humanity and our connection. I have experienced these ‘promises’ and continue to be a witness to the truth of his testimony. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path of Spiritual Growth

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 130

“There are no proofs for the existence of the God of Abraham. There are only witnesses. The greatness of the prophet lies not only in the ideas he expressed, but also in the moments he experienced. The prophet is a witness, and his words a testimony to His power and judgement, to His justice and mercy.”(Essential Writings pg. 64)

Imbuing Rabbi Heschel’s description of “the greatness of the prophet” should cause us to ponder both their words and their experiences. The prophet comes to us with a power and a ferocity borne from his experience of his encounter with God, fueled by the decency, kindness, caring he has for the human condition, and the vision of a path out of mendacity and duplicity. Yet, up to today, we continue to disbelieve them, discount their “ideas” and deny their experiences.

When a the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court can say: “human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without the wrath of a holy God” while allowing innocent people to be put to death, while continuing racist policies, while dehumanizing women and making them subservient to men, etc is in direct opposition to the “holy God” he speaks about if we are to believe the prophet, if we are to accept the truth of their ideas and their experiences. Yet, he sees no contradictions between his words and his actions. Herein lies the challenge for all of us.

We read the prophet’s words, at some of us do, we quote them and we use them to validate our ways of living while denying their ideas and their experiences with our actions. Much like the people of Ancient Israel and Ancient Judea, we proclaim our loyalty and fealty to “the God of Abraham” while our actions and our words deny the “greatness of the prophet”…the ideas he expressed” and “the moments he experienced”. We deny the truth of his encounter with God, his being empowered by God to help us return to living in God’s ways, in being truly human, and instead we seek to use them to puff ourselves up, to offer phony words of praise and understanding to bolster our power and make our own names great.

Be it in the political realm, the religious realm, the social realm, what is happening across the spectrum of each of these realms is “Hillul HaShem”, the desecration of God’s Name, not the sanctification of God’s Name as these deceivers proclaim. When a business is more concerned about their shareholders and their dividends, their profits and covering up their mistakes, when “the buyer beware” instead of full disclosure of the flaws,  etc are the ‘rules of business, we are ignoring both the ideas and the experiences of the prophet. When we continue to imprison the ideas of the prophets and decry their descendants, we do so at our own peril. When we use lies and deceptions to denigrate decency, freedom, the dignity and worth of certain individuals and groups so we can hold onto and/or gain/regain power, we are denying the “greatness of the prophet” and his ideas and experiences. When we hear spiritual leaders use their words as a call to action against their ideas and experiences, we are in danger of losing our ability to make “free will moral choices” as Rabbi Abraham Twerski teaches us is an essential ingredient of being human.

“The greatness of the prophet” is the central idea that I hear from him: the purpose of human life is to serve something greater than itself. We are called by the prophet to rise above our pettiness and pride, our envy and enmity, our prejudices and fears to live into the beauty, the glory, the joy, the freedom of serving the ideas, the will of God. The prophet’s experience is one of connection with God and human beings. The prophet’s ideas and experience are to have a “powerful dissent, a painful rebuke, a deep love and unwavering hope” as Rabbi Heschel says in his interview with Carl Stern. These experiences and ideas are gifted to us by the prophet so we can emulate them, we can live into them, we can engage with them and make our corner of the world a little better. In Leviticus we are told to “proclaim freedom throughout the land to all its inhabitants thereof”, this is inscribed on the Liberty Bell as well. Yet, rather than walk in the footsteps of the prophet, we walk instead in the footsteps of the deceivers, rather than walk the “freedom trail” we walk the slave route, rather than live the truth that “all people(sic) are created equal”, we still live into the lie of white superiority. Rather than stand up for the people, for truth, for freedom, for God, many are standing with Putin, authoritarianism, Christian Nationalism, and other ways of denigrating the human spirit, the image of God we all are created in and calling this religion, swearing they are the ‘true inheritors’ of the prophets so they can deceive their followers.

We are in desperate need of recovery from our societal mendacity. We are in desperate need all of us to join the recovery movement that promotes a spiritual literacy drawn from the ideas and experiences of the prophet. Bill Wilson’s experience of his spiritual awakening is similar to the experience of the prophet’s experience with God. Every spiritual awakening, be it ecstatic or the ‘educational variety’ mirrors the experience of the prophet and through this experience, we become imbued with his ideas and the path to carry them out. In recovery, we don’t need a hierarchy to tell us what to do, we need to listen to our higher consciousness, our soul, and use the ideas and experiences of the prophet to propel ourselves to greater heights, to our proper actions, to fulfilling the words on the Liberty Bell and we live together in freedom, with respect and rejoice in our differences and learn from one another-rather than continue to deny the humanity of another for our own gain. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Path of Spiritual Growth

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 129

“There are no proofs for the existence of the God of Abraham. There are only witnesses. The greatness of the prophet lies not only in the ideas he expressed, but also in the moments he experienced. The prophet is a witness, and his words a testimony to His power and judgement, to His justice and mercy.”(Essential Writings pg. 64)

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching in the first two sentences above are a challenge to all of us. Since the time of the Greeks of antiquity humanity has adopted a belief of believing only what we can see and prove. Rather than accept the words of witnesses, we have come to demand proof “for the existence of the God of Abraham”. Rather than accept the wisdom of the Bible, rather than accept the Bible as testimony “for the existence of the God of Abraham”, we want to prove God’s existence. In our search for proof, we then twist ourselves into a pretzel to validate the testimony of the Bible, we seek to explain the Bible rather than accept the eternal truth and wisdom of it. Some of us seek to ignore it all together because we don’t believe the witnesses, we dismiss the testimony as hearsay and rely solely on scientific proofs.

We are so reliant on “proofs” that we come to question what we see with our own eyes at times, we challenge the people who “know in their bones” what is real and call out the deceivers. Yet, because the deceivers are so clever, they can offer false proofs of their claims, human beings are more willing to believe the proofs offered with the deceiver’s words than what they are actually seeing. We have come to disbelieve what we ourselves witness with our own eyes, what we experience with our souls to the ruination of our being human.

Whether it is in the political realm, the business realm, the social realm, the religious realm, we are more apt to believe the lies because they can be ‘proven’ by the liars than the truth that we know in our inner lives. We have become so spiritually bankrupt that we question what we know in our hearts because we our minds come to overrule what we know in our guts. This is the tragedy of human existence, in my opinion. When the founding fathers went along with the idea that Black men only counted as 3/5’s of a person even though they witnesses with their own eyes the human being in front of them, they denied their own truth. When they proclaimed to be “God-fearing” men and decided to go against the testimony of the Bible, that all human beings are created in the image of God, they decided to go against the truth of their own Declaration of Independence, our founding fathers gave into mendacity and made a political decision, going against their own eyes, uprooting the testimony of the Bible and their own experience.

When we allow corporations to be treated like individuals for the purpose of political contributions and not hold them responsible for their criminal acts, instead allowing them to pay fines without admitting guilt, we are denying the testimony of our experiences and our eyes. When we go along with the lunatics who proclaim that ‘the sky is falling’ when we are experiencing economic and societal conditions that honor the dignity of all people, we are denying what we see with our own eyes. When we denigrate people who have helped us, when we deny the truth of a situation because it doesn’t fit into our ‘plans’ or does not go along with what is expedient to and for us, we are denying what we witness.

When the tabloids, when the gossip, when the stories told deny what the whole picture of a situation, what the entirety of a person is, we are denying the truth of what is. Human beings have denied what they witness and the testimony of another(s) forever. We have a deep-seated tendency to want to have “rule” over one another rather than accept the proof of the Bible, the call of God to live together in harmony and peace. Rather than be grateful for what we have, rather than accept we owe a debt to God, we owe a debt to the myriad of people who help us on a daily basis, rather than surrender to the truth of “the existence of the God of Abraham” and all of the responsibilities this entails, we deny these responsibilities when they are inconvenient for us. We forget, denigrate those who have helped us because we don’t want to admit our debt, we don’t want to seem ‘weak’ for needing help, so we make those who helped us disappear.

Denial is not just a river in Egypt, as we say in recovery! Each day we remind ourselves not to whore after our heart and our eyes because we see something that is shinier and we want it. In recovery, we see the ‘proofs’ we used to continue to deny the truth of our existence. We commit to let go of these lies, to put on “a new pair of glasses” and see what is. We listen to the testimony of the another(s) who tell their stories of degradation and deception prior to their recovering the truth of their existence, prior to recovering their dignity, our humanity. We promote these stories to our children and their friends so they can hear the “proof for the existence of the God of Abraham” and how to live into God’s will, God’s ways and let go of the innate selfishness of human beings.

I give testimony of God’s existence daily-to myself, to another(s) in order to make life better for me and for them. Part of my testimony is what not to do, my actions teach me and another(s) how not to be because of false ego and false pride. Most of my testimony is how to take the next right action and no matter what ‘they’ say, I am proud of my growing my humanity. I know the truth of the existence of God because I am a recipient and witness to God’s grace and love. My T’Shuvah, my recovery, my learning and growing into being human are my testimony “for the existence of the God of Abraham”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 128

“The words the prophet utters are not offered as souvenirs. His speech to the people is not a reminiscence, a report, hearsay. The prophet not only conveys, he reveals. He almost does unto others what God does unto him. In speaking, the prophet reveals God. This is the marvel of the prophet’s work: in his words, the invisible God becomes audible. He does not prove or argue. The thought he has to convey is more than language can contain. Divine power bursts in his words. The authenticity of the prophet is in the Presence his words reveal.” (Essential Writings pg. 64)

The last sentence above seems to elude most people. While we read the prophet, quote the prophet, misuse his words to validate whatever position one wants to take, we fail to allow “the Presence his words reveal” to penetrate our inner life, our souls. Because of our reliance on our intellect, on the dictates of societal norms, we water down the revelation of God in the message of the prophet, we shield our self from the full impact of “the Presence his words reveal” and we do so at our own peril.

The prophet is radical, abrasive, unyielding, relentless in his mission of holding a mirror up to us which reflects how far we have gone from “the Presence” that brought us out of Egypt, that gives us a way of living together without the senseless hatred, without the incessant need for power, for blame, for being irresponsible in the ways we act. His words reveal the call of the Ineffable One for us to return, the call of love, the call of compassion and concern, the call of forgiveness, the call to truth. He is not revealing anger at the people even though his words sound angry, rather he is revealing the anguish he experiences and that “the Presence” experiences at our running away from the call of the covenant, the deal we made at Sinai, the love of humanity that “the Presence” has.

The prophet reveals the mendacity of those who proclaim dogma uber alles, he reveals the deception of those who claim perfection and/or our need to be perfect, he reveals the lies of making our minds, our wealth, our possessions the new Golden Calf. The prophet reveals “the Presence” in voice and in direction while we, the people, bastardize his words to fit our selfish needs. We hear people proclaim that God should stay out of our politics when the prophet’s words are used to uncover the lies and deceptions of ‘the religious’ people, when their words are used to unmask the mendacity of ‘the humanists’. Just as in the 1960’s ‘god-fearing’ people thought that Rabbi Heschel, Rev. King, the Berrigan Brothers should not be involved in politics because they should stay in their houses of worship, today we see many of the ‘religious’ people proclaiming that putting ‘god’ into our politics takes us back to the ‘good old days’ of white power, of racism, of support of fascism, anti-semitism, anti-LGBTQ+, etc. “The Presence his words reveal” are ignored because these ‘religious’ and ‘humanistic’ conservatives and progressives are unwilling to look in the mirror and see what the words of the prophets reveal about themselves.

We have to immerse ourselves in the words of the prophet, we have to re-experience “the Presence his words reveal” every day, every week, every year because not doing so leads us to the same actions that destroyed the kingdoms of Israel and Judea. What the prophet’s words reveal is the inner rot of the societies, the decay of the inner life of the individuals both in charge and their followers. “The Presence” is calling to us to change, to return through the words of the prophet and without experiencing their words anew, we will continue to slide into the same rot and decay. Some would say we are there and have never left-which may be true and makes the need to experience, to see what his words reveal all the more important.

To do this, we have to take off our dark glasses, we have to unmask ourselves and our communities, we have to end our incessant “need to be right” and “on advice of counsel”, on our deceptive practice of “this is for the good of society” and “only I can solve this/only you understand me” bullshit. We have to ask ourselves the questions that the prophet’s words are the answer for; we have to recognize the myriad of ways our prayers and acts of charity are self-serving rather than serving “the Presence”, the slight of hand we continue to play when we proclaim loyalty and fealty to ‘scripture’ while really proclaiming loyalty and fealty to our selfishness, our hunger for power, to those who join with us or we join with to achieve power and control. The prophet reveals our falseness, our inauthentic natures, the masks we wear and the make-up we put on. The prophet’s words reveal the lipstick we are putting on a pig and calling it kosher and we continue to hide from their revelations because of our unwillingness to look in the mirrors the prophet holds up to us, we are afraid to face “the Presence he reveals in his words”.

“The Presence he reveals in his words” is the foundation of recovery, not all of us have the same ‘definition’ or ‘understanding’ of “the Presence” and we all share the values and the new norms the words of the prophet reveal. We are not perfect and we also argue about dogma and spirit, about the path of recovery not being the same for everyone and how everyone should just follow the steps and life will be good. Yet, we all agree on our need to connect to something greater than ourselves so we can have a psychic shift from our “stinking thinking” to a higher/God consciousness. We all know without living our spiritual values out loud, we will return to the despair, degradation, and insanity of our former ways of  life. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom- A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 127

“The words the prophet utters are not offered as souvenirs. His speech to the people is not a reminiscence, a report, hearsay. The prophet not only conveys, he reveals. He almost does unto others what God does unto him. In speaking, the prophet reveals God. This is the marvel of the prophet’s work: in his words, the invisible God becomes audible. He does not prove or argue. The thought he has to convey is more than language can contain. Divine power bursts in his words. The authenticity of the prophet is in the Presence his words reveal.” (Essential Writings pg. 64)

Society conveys thoughts and ideas through words and we use our minds to ‘conquer’ our problems. We think we ‘know’ what the Bible says, we think can figure every thing out with our rational thinking, in fact, what doesn’t make sense, we tend to discard. Rabbi Heschel is reminding us that not everything is conveyable in language, our minds cannot comprehend, apprehend, nor convey all that is happening within us and in the world. The prophet comes to us with language that is, in ways, inadequate to express the ideas, the power, the path of living well and the path of return we desperately need to adopt and adapt to.

If we only read the prophet’s words, we can ignore the meaning and the power of them just like the Ancient Israelites and people of Ancient Judea did, just as people throughout the millennia have. Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above: “the thought he has to convey is more than language can contain” demands  we allow the words of the prophet to penetrate our souls, our inner lives. Yet, we continue to brace ourselves from allowing them into the core of being.

While there are many who ‘believe’ in God, who quote the prophet’s words, who maintain they are ‘religious’ and follow the dogma, these same people pray the words of prayers, read the words of scripture without letting them penetrate their inner life, without allowing them to change their thinking. We have become so enamored with our rational minds, we have forgotten the teaching of the Kotzker Rebbe: “Where do you find God…Wherever/whenever you let God in.” While there are many who proclaim to be ‘following the letter of the law’ in jurisprudence and in their religious life, these same people seem oblivious to the “divine power” that “bursts in his words” when reading, quoting, using the prophet’s words to prover their way is the only way. We are in desperate need of rearranging our ways of understanding the prophet’s words, the words of our Scriptures, the call of the people around us, and the cry of our inner life.

Rabbi Heschel is, once again, calling us to account in the nicest of ways, he is rebuking us for studying the prophet’s words for our own misuse of them. I hear him demand that we repair the errors of our ancestors and hear the prophet’s words without trying to think of how to abuse them for our own good and, instead, hear them with the “divine power” and use them to repair the spiritual maladies we suffer from and the ones we face each and every day. Rabbi Heschel is giving  us a path for return and repair through experiencing the words of the prophet rather than thinking we can fully understand them with our mind, that we can take in all they convey through language.

We need to return to the moments after crossing the Red Sea, the moments at Sinai, the moments of spiritual awakening, the moments of clarity/serenity we experience and turn them into stepping stones to a “richer and more meaningful life”. We, the people, have to throw off the yoke of Napoleon Hill’s: “what the mind can conceive, man can achieve”, we have to stop living as Descartes says: “I think, therefore I am”. We have to return to the words of the prophet and hear them through our inner life, through our souls. We have to be overwhelmed with the “divine power” that “bursts In his words” and use this power to overcome our rational minds automatic rejection of the prophet’s words, our rational minds automatic habit of reshaping the prophet’s words to fit its own scheme of things, to hear the words of the prophet and twist them to validate the dogma they want to follow and/or they want to use to have power over another(s). Our world is in desperate need of heeding the words of the prophet as well as appreciating the myriad of seconds, moments of spiritual awakening we have that we dismiss. Even people who acknowledge a moment of spiritual awakening often fail to realize the necessity to grow those moments, to engage in a spiritual discipline that causes the seeds planted in these moments to flourish through our nurturing of them, our engagement with them, our surrender to them.

These moments of spiritual awakening are the beginning of recovery for most of us, even those who say their conversion was not of an ecstatic nature. Every moment of clarity is a moment of spiritual awakening, a moment where our minds take second place to what our inner life is telling us. In recovery, we continue to “grow along spiritual lines” because we know that nothing else will help us recover our authentic self and repair the damage we have done internally and externally with our “stinking thinking”.

I continue to return to and grow these moments of spiritual awakening each day. One of the ways I do this is through studying and writing my awakenings of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching. Another way I do this is to constantly forgive those who have harmed me and ask for forgiveness from those I have harmed. Letting go of resentments and seeing the “divine power” in what transpires in my life gives me more freedom and joy each day. I continue to repair my errors, I continue to return to the words of the prophet so I can experience each day anew, each person I know anew, and have my rational mind be subservient to my “intuitive mind”, as Einstein teaches. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 126

“The words the prophet utters are not offered as souvenirs. His speech to the people is not a reminiscence, a report, hearsay. The prophet not only conveys, he reveals. He almost does unto others what God does unto him. In speaking, the prophet reveals God. This is the marvel of the prophet’s work: in his words, the invisible God becomes audible. He does not prove or argue. The thought he has to convey is more than language can contain. Divine power bursts in his words. The authenticity of the prophet is in the Presence his words reveal.” (Essential Writings pg. 64)

“He does not prove or argue” is such a beautiful description of the prophet by Rabbi Heschel and it goes against most of Western dialogue. Experiencing this truth calls us to appreciate the prophet as one of the great orators in history. There is no need for him to offer proof of his words, there is no reason to argue with the people as he comes to give us direction, he is sent to help us return to a primordial state of being connected to something greater than ourselves, to come home to satisfy our deepest need; connection to God, connection to our authentic self. Yet, even up to today, we argue with the words of the prophet, we continue to seek proof that he existed, that there is God, that we can actually live and thrive when following his words, his call, his demand. Be it the Rabbis, the Priests, the Ministers, the Imams, the secularists, all use the prophet’s words to validate some bastardization of the Bible that they believe serves them, rather than live into the prophet’s warnings, the prophet’s exhortations to us for our return. The acceptance of truth seems to be the hardest stats of humanity today and forever in our history, the changing of our ways, the repentance needed so we can humble ourselves before the words of the prophet and before God seem to constantly elude us because we want to prove ourselves right, argue against the eternal truth of the prophet’s words and call for our return.

We are engaged in a great battle in our society, we are repeating the days of Ancient Israel and Ancient Judea once again. We have despots who rule countries, want-to-be authoritarians seeking to take control of democracies, wealthy people who want to gain more and more power, and a large portion of the people in these democracies who, through their own fear of being irrelevant, go against their own interests to support these deceivers and liars. Listen to the news, read a paper, magazine, hear the dialogue between people and arguing for or against the words of the prophet, the call of God, is rampant. Yet, even many of those who argue for the words of the prophet do so for their own selfish desire for power, for control rather than for the sake of Heaven and humanity. It is so sad and distressing to witness the uplifting of Fox News, the shouts of the ‘progressives’, the splintering of people into “identity politics”, the twisting of the words of the prophet and the Bible itself by ‘spiritual leaders’ who have their own agenda-keep the masses coming to church, temple, the mosque; keep them paying for the upkeep of the clergy; and hold onto to control of and shape the narrative they are being paid for,  in either money or fame, keeping the people in line. Rather than heeding the words of the prophet, rather than staying ‘in line with the divine’ the leaders of the battle against the simplicity and truth of the prophet want us to follow the leader to our ruin.

Not needing to argue or prove is anathema to most of us. It is hard to live in acceptance of the truth of the words of the prophet. We want to find the loopholes, we want to bend their words to fit our needs rather than bend our selves to fit the needs of God as they speak the divine message to us. The difficulty, I believe, comes from our fear of saying we are wrong, we have made mistakes, we must change our ways. These admissions, we falsely believe, make us weak and vulnerable so we argue with the prophet, we argue with their descendants like Rabbi Heschel, Dr. King, et al, or we ignore them completely. “Oops, I made a mistake” are the 5 hardest words to put in one sentence for most of us, even when we say them, we come up with excuses, arguments, reasons why it wasn’t completely our fault. Rather than live into the words of the prophet, rather than not argue or need proof of the truth and validity of his words, we find ways to soothe ourselves by calling him “abrasive, difficult, out of touch with reality, unyielding, not accepting our half-truths, etc”. We run away from the words of the prophet, possibly, precisely because he offers no proof nor countenances any arguments-something we engage in constantly so we can feel better than, we can find the ‘reason’ we are right. It just seems to hard to repent, return, and have new responses to the words of the prophet, to the call of God.

The recovery movement is based in the acceptance of truth, a new/different way of translating the words of the prophet into action. We “come to believe that power greater than ourselves can return us to sanity” and we “turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand God”. Having first admitted our powerlessness over people, places and things, we begin to become responsible to God for both our deeds and our misdeeds. Because of being in recovery, many of us experience the words of the prophets more personally, with greater hope that return is possible, that we ‘leopards’ can and will change our spots, we will be forgiven, and we can live differently. Everything the prophet demands of us, we in the recovery movement adhere to. While many in recovery protest against ‘religion’, upon closer examination, we all become willing to a greater or lessor degree to follow the spiritual path of the prophet, the values and principles of the Bible. Only through acceptance of the truth of the prophet, not needing to argue or seek proof that a path of recovery improves our life immeasurably, can we find a peace and a way of living that is compatible with being a partner of God. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Wisdom - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 125

“The words the prophet utters are not offered as souvenirs. His speech to the people is not a reminiscence, a report, hearsay. The prophet not only conveys, he reveals. He almost does unto others what God does unto him. In speaking, the prophet reveals God. This is the marvel of the prophet’s work: in his words, the invisible God becomes audible. He does not prove or argue. The thought he has to convey is more than language can contain. Divine power bursts in his words. The authenticity of the prophet is in the Presence his words reveal.” (Essential Writings pg. 64)

There is a story told about the Hasidic Rebbe, Reb Zuysa, that each time during the study of the Bible where it says “God spoke”, he would scream and cry, and over and over again would say ‘God speaks, God speaks’. Rabbi Heschel’s teaching about “the marvel of the prophet’s work” reminds me of this story and of the lack of enthusiasm the people then and we, now, have for this marvel! Rather than be awed and overwhelmed with joy, fear, trembling at the experience of “the invisible God becomes audible”, we look to find the flaws, the interesting ‘facts’, we argue against the teachings and we have come to emulate the people the prophet speaks against, the priestly class, the ruling class and the wealthy class all who care for nothing outside of their selfish interests and, when convenient, one another.

Because the prophet rails against these ‘special interest group’ in the name of God and all the people, he was shunned then and is shunned now. While we give nice lip service to the prophet’s words and actions, very few of us are willing to stand with them and continue their battle, continue to live into their teachings and turn up the volume so “the invisible God becomes audible” to more and more people. The prophet was ‘one who knows’ just like Moses, Joshua, Samuel, Joseph, Judah, David, Solomon, etc and he kept screaming out to those who were ‘seeking to know’ and to unplug the ears of those who were so lost, so deaf they were sure they were right, they knew and they could do what they wanted in the ‘name of God’ and get away with it. We, the people today also fall into these three categories and, like in the Bible, those in the third category seem to dominate societal ways, dominate ‘the ways of the world’ and, what is so frightening, they have lied to themselves so well, they believe they are doing good, on ‘the right side’ of things, dominating and using the tactics of bullies in such ‘sweet’ ways, etc. When the prophet’s words reach out to them, they kill, defame, denigrate both the message and the messenger, otherwise they would actually have to do an accounting of their soul and and learn the truth-which is too scary and painful for the people in this category. An amazing ‘fact’ is that the people in this category come from all walks of life, all economic status and, seemingly even have completely opposite viewpoints and yet, they use the same tactics, have the same lies and deceptions and spew the same mendacious reasoning for their actions!

When we immerse ourselves in the words of Hosea, when we are truly able to see how we have “whored after our heart and our eyes” rather than stayed faithful to God, when we can admit our adultery, seek forgiveness and have a new path to follow so we can and will stay faithful, then we are hearing and living into the words of the prophet. Then, we will live into “in his words the invisible God becomes audible”. This teaching brings into clarity for me one reason the prophet is such an important figure in religious and spiritual growing and maturing; the prophet not only makes God “audible”, because the Torah does this as well, the prophet is relentless in making “audible” the entire teachings of God and the raison d’être of humanity=“love your neighbor as you love yourself”, “care for the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the poor, the needy”, etc. The prophet reminds us each day, each moment that God is calling, God needs us to do better, we have to stand with those in need and we have to rebuke the people who are unable to follow the words of God as spoken through the prophet. We need to say NO and rebuke  those who use the words of the prophet to silence the voices of the “ones who know” and the “ones who seek”, we have to say NO and rebuke those who seek to enslave the people with lies, with deceptions and with ‘harsh labor’. We have to say NO and rebuke those who continue to ‘speak for the Lord’ while speaking for themselves, the ruling class, and the wealthy. This is how we help the prophet fulfill “the marvel of his work”!!

We recover our integrity in recovery, we recover the truth, we uncover the deceptions and mendacities we have bought into and sold. We recover the ability to hear the words of the prophet, we recover the ability to listen and understand “the invisible God” who now “becomes audible” because we have “taken the cotton out of our ears”. While the prophet isn’t mentioned in the Big Book, the teachings of the prophet are replete within it as a solution to the myriad of addictions we suffer from and, I believe the number one addiction, the first one is believing the lies we tell ourselves and the lies society tells us. When we recover our hearing and we listen to the call of God, as we understand God, follow this call, we are also continuing the work of the prophet, continuing to make audible “the invisible God”.

I spend my days recovering the voice, the sounds, the words of the prophet within me, within everyone I encounter. I love the prophet because he speaks in a language I can understand and believe in. In his words I hear God loud and clear, I know the “fire in the belly” of Jeremiah, the pain of Hosea at the unfaithfulness of the woman he loves, the call of Isaiah and Amos and Micah to return, to stop living in mendacity. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark